Oh did you think the “continued in part 2” was a joke?
Consider the following:
It it hadn’t been for Cotton Eyed Joe, I’d have been married a long time ago. Where did he come from, where did he go? Where did you come from, Cotton Eyed Joe?
Do you remember Rednex’s 2nd single?
Old Pop in an Oak is a song about family. Not just the eponymous Pop but also Big Daddy and Big Momma.
But the most important thing to know about Old Pop in an Oak is that if you listen to it immediately after Cotton Eye Joe, a song about a lawless wandering cowboy, you’d be forgive. For thinking you had just heard the same song twice.
Really it’s uncanny.
You see country music has a bit of an image problem, in that to the untrained ear it all sounds the same, but Rednex freed country music from this prison by mashing it up with electronic dance beats, making Cotton Eyed Joe a literally outstanding example of the genre. It stands out because it’s different to every other blue grass country song. But if you apply the same process to another song of the genre, suddenly not only is the new song not really all that different, but the first song seems worse, because suddenly it is not an outstanding piece of media, but simply one of many.
Rednex did not last as long as the Vengaboys¹ and generally were considered something of a joke from that point on.
Lest you think my musical tastes ended in the 90s I should probably diversify and point out that one hit wonders have existed since the start of pop music and continue to this day. The link provided is a Spotify playlist but not one I curated myself, so not all of the songs listed will meet the primary criteria for this article: The phrase they used to associate with many of them is a Novelty Item.
The earliest novelty item I recall is Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce² and the most recent one I can bring to mind is Gangnam Style by Psy³. What these two sons have in common is that they both had a sort of alien sounding foreignness to them, and they were both from artists with a very long musical career, albeit made up largely of material that to us sounded exactly the same. Joe Dolce failed to get traction with his follow up song You Toucha My Car I Breaka You Face⁴. Meanwhile Psy is legendarily popular in Korea, where he is seen as a revolutionary counter culture figure. Of course one song in Korean sounds the same to English ears as any other. Heck if you learned anything from my previous posts it’s that a lot of English listeners probably think he’s Chinese.
Let’s shift gears and apply this to magic how long a show do you think you could perform where each trick had the same genre? The same theme? Whereas the previous post was a low key call out of magic tricks that are about nothing but ego, this is aimed at themed shows that cling too tightly to too specific a topic.
I have very slowly been carving out a repertoire of original routines, and one of the earliest was a time travel inspired cut and restored rope, with a bit of a Back to the Future flavour and after receiving a little acclaim for it I started to routine other tricks around the topic of time travel. None of these landed quite as solidly, and I realised it was because a single strongly themed routine stood out, but surrounded by others it just disappeared, despite being the best one.
This goes hand in hand with the principle mentioned before of handwaving a causal premise. Many performers make the mistake of trying to define a power set, a system of formal rules for what miracles they can or cannot produce but in doing so they railroad their show into a series of increasingly similar stunts with the only variation being how effective they are. Mentalism often suffers from this, because the mentalismn casual premise limits performers to three types of effect: reading, influence, and prediction. If you look at the career of arguably the most famous mentalist of the current era (Derren Brown) you can see that he leaves this lane regularly to do such effects as levitations, spirit cabinets, psychic surgery, hypnotism, sideshow stunts and even a metamorphosis type effect with a gorilla costume.
In short, diversify!
Eugene Burger spoke at length about how magic shows need texture, defined as emotional and thematic shifts between tricks.
Otherwise you may find yourself becoming a one hit wonder.
Stay tuned for the final installment of this series in which I talk about the greatest albums ever released and what makes them amazing.
¹ Although they are still touring! Even Rednex, who only ever had one hit, put out 3 albums, another 10 singles and still get live gigs.
² Who went on to co write one of the songs from the soundtrack to The Terminator. Thanks Wikipedia.
³ Which was in 2012 so there have probably been at least 10 more recent examples. Excuse me while I quickly age into a dessicated skeleton and crumble into dust over here.
⁴ Astoundingly I am not making that up.